Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to speak to Bill C-53, which is about regulating pesticides. I am pleased to do so because prior to joining this place I held a pesticide applicator's licence for about 20 years and used pesticides in a very broad landscape, that being the forests on the coast of British Columbia. Of course that at times could be a controversial thing to do, but I think I did it very responsibly. I feel that as a consequence of that background I can bring a perspective to this issue that is different from many in the House
The average person has to think for a minute about what we mean when we say pesticide, because it can mean anything from the little spray thing used on insects to something spread by an airplane in Vietnam to knock out forest canopy. There are a lot of visual images. Pesticides is the umbrella term for herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. When we talk about using a pesticide, then, we have to define what the pest is, and the pest is in the eye of the beholder. What is a pest today might not be a pest tomorrow.
We are all sophisticated enough to recognize that when it comes to a management regime, it is important to define what we are trying to do and to target whatever we are trying to do as closely as possible. That is something I took pride in doing, because for the most part the kinds of applications I was involved with were done by hand and done, in my case, on an individual tree basis.
This did give me a certain perspective relating to how the pesticide management review agency should operate. At that time, if a product had an agricultural label, even though that might be a perfect formulation for use in the forest, one might be pre-empted from using it. Because the agricultural market then was a lot larger than the forest management market, many companies refused to pay the serious upfront expenditures required in order to get that kind of labelling because it was simply not worth it.
We oftentimes felt we were using chemicals that we would have preferred not to, but we were using them because they were the only ones authorized under the federal permitting process. I have not kept up with all of the detail behind this, but in all likelihood that probably is still occurring. I see that the legislation still includes as a part of the process that the effectiveness of the chemical be listed and I think this is counterproductive. This is one part of the bill that I definitely would like to see changed. Let the customer, the industry, whatever sector is using that formulation, determine whether or not the chemical is effective.
I can give a somewhat humorous example. When maple trees are cut down they coppice, they tend to grow up from the stump. There is a lot of energy in the roots and they have this multiple stem coppice that comes up. We found this most disconcerting in some areas that had a lot of maple. We wanted to establish a new crop, but that is not what we wanted so we tried different chemicals and chemical formulations and nothing worked. Then we had a crew go through a hillside and inject the individual stems. We found that it worked sometimes and not other times.
Through trial and error and scientific analysis we checked to see why it would work here and not work there. We found it was working where we had a somewhat lazy operator, a lazy worker who did not treat every stem or every coppice. We figured the biology is that by keeping a few alive, the material recycled enough times that it got everywhere and then eventually killed the entire coppice network.
We learned a huge lesson by accident from a worker who was not following instructions. The very way we have had some of our best scientific discoveries has been through laboratory accidents or observations where things have happened overnight in a Petri dish or in some other experiment.
The government should try to stay away from regulating all of the uses or potential uses and let industry and the user make that decision. Of course, safety has to be the first and foremost concern.
Those are some of my key observations. I am a great believer that target treatment is important. Operational and other research and development should be encouraged. The way to encourage that is to have not too much specified detail on how people utilize the material.
Other than that, the bill is going in the right direction. I am encouraged that we have let local usage be determined at the local level. That is very important.